Jack Nicholson set out to scare people with his perfect role: “I want them to be worried”
In 1987, Jack Nicholson played the role it seemed his entire career had always been building toward. The same man who terrified audiences in The Shining and would soon become the Clown Prince of Crime in Batman signed up to portray our culture’s ultimate villain – and he took the part seriously. Very seriously. In fact, Nicholson went to hell and back while researching the role and revealed that he legitimately wanted audiences to be frightened of him every time he came on-screen.
When Nicholson spoke with The New York Times Magazine in ’86, he was one of the most sought-after actors in Hollywood, as well as one of the most mysterious. Known as much for his fierce commitment to method-acting as his penchant for partying extremely hard, Nicholson’s reputation always preceded him everywhere he went. He felt dangerous and unpredictable in real life, let alone on the big screen, thanks to his permanently arched eyebrows, a mischievous glint in his eye, and rogueish grin
This is why it made perfect sense when Nicholson revealed, “I’ve been studying to play the Devil.” He then flashed that devilish smile and added, “Of course, a lot of people think I’ve been preparing for it all my life.”
He was, of course, talking about playing Darryl Van Horne in The Witches of Eastwick, based on a novel by John Updike. The film saw Nicholson play a mysterious character – who may or may not be the fallen angel Lucifer himself – who begins romancing a trio of unwitting witches, played by Susan Sarandon, Cher, and Michelle Pfieffer.
Even though Witches was a black comedy, Nicholson didn’t devote himself to the part any less than he would for a role in an Oscar-baiting drama. He dived deep into Dante’s Inferno, poring over a dusty old copy of the book with Gustave Dore’s original paintings from 1857. Nicholson mused to the undoubtedly bemused interviewer, “Aquinas and all those people discuss this, but they never arrive at a definition of evil, which I found interesting. The only thing they could come up with was that you couldn’t define the principle because it was always a paradox of opposites.”
The dedicated star also began learning how to play the violin because Van Horne is a virtuoso. Naturally, he knew that his violin playing would likely be dubbed over in the final movie, no matter how good or bad he could make it. That wasn’t the point, though. Even if the audience would never hear his real playing, he still felt he needed to look like he knew what he was doing, so he hired a teacher and devoted countless hours to the craft.
This level of immersion in a character wasn’t unusual for Nicholson, whose process had yielded incredible performances in the past. Interestingly, before he’d even stepped foot on set as the Devil, he was preparing for how the public would react to his portrayal. After all, he revealed that women’s opinion of him took a nosedive in real life after the 1971 film Carnal Knowledge, in which he played Jonathan Fuerst, a cynical, emotionally bruising womaniser. While it seems strange that people couldn’t separate the art from the artist, Nicholson admitted he expected it because of how thoroughly despicable he made the character.
This time, though, Nicholson knew he had to go further than he did on Carnal Knowledge. In Witches, he wasn’t playing a man with questionable morals; instead, he was tasked with playing the being who has become a byword for evil throughout history. This required accessing a whole new level of his process, regardless of how the world would react to him.
He revealed, “I’m going to play the Devil, and I don’t want to play him safely. I want people to think Jack Nicholson is the Devil. I want them to be worried.”
